Lefkow killings heated by what we don't know

There is an old red-brick alley behind the Lefkow home, the site of Chicago's latest heater homicide case--the slayings of the husband and the mother of a federal judge.

Most photographers and TV cameras focused on the front of the house, where some neighbors walked on the sidewalk with flowers, where cops went in and out.

But the alley compelled me. It is crooked and bumpy with a few red bricks missing, like something of old Chicago, like a ruined mouth leering up at the back end of that old gray frame house where the killings took place.

That's where I was Tuesday, in that alley, and then up on the back porch of the apartment building behind it, looking down on the red bricks, on the Lefkow home. And on the yellow police tape, on snow and footprints, black plastic garbage bins, husky young cops in short jackets, on brown frozen weeds in the yard, their seed pods in clumps, shaking there in the moist March wind.

I wondered about the killer or killers, how they got ready for it out there.

And whether they were breathing hard while casing the house, if they jumped the rusty cyclone fence, scooted across the backyard, breaking a window on the north side of the home before they did the two people inside.

If you follow the news you know that U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow came home Monday evening to find her husband, Michael F. Lefkow, 64, and her mother, 89-year-old Donna Grace Humphrey, in the basement.

They were each shot in the head, or so we're told, and Tribune reporters learned that Humphrey, who needed canes or a walker to get around, was in the basement and the canes were upstairs, indicating she had been dragged down there at the end.

As heater cases go--meaning vividly public murders with high-profile victims and media pressure--this one is proceeding as to form. The first time I read the phrase "public murders," it was the title of a novel by former Tribune columnist Bill Granger, and I've never read a more accurate understanding of how these things go:

First, speculation without facts as to motive, the victims usually prominent and white; increasing pressure on City Hall to find the killer; and in the absence of real facts, more speculation as to blame.

It is true Judge Lefkow has been at odds with white supremacist Matthew Hale, who was convicted of conspiring to have her killed, after she found him in contempt of court in another case.

The U.S. marshal's office assessed the threat in 2003 and was ready to continue protecting her home. Officially, a spokeswoman at the Lefkow slayings news conference on Tuesday said they had protected her home for a short period, then stopped, but didn't explain why. But later, agency officials told me that Judge Lefkow had asked them to stand down.

We're also tempted to connect Hale to the killings. Hale thought Judge Lefkow was a Jew, or married a Jew, and told me so, when I interviewed him in the federal building, just minutes before he was seized by FBI agents and charged with conspiring to have Judge Lefkow killed. He didn't know that the Lefkows are Episcopalians. Neither did I then, when he spat his hatred upon her.

She crossed others, too, including one of the most feared men in Chicago, the Outfit enforcer Frankie "The German" Schweihs. She ordered Schweihs held without bond pending his 1988 extortion trial, saying the reputed hit man was capable of "committing dangerous acts."

Schweihs was convicted and sent to prison. He's one of those Outfit types mined for DNA as the FBI investigates old murders as part of Operation Family Secrets, an investigation I told you about three years ago.

But no one has connected the German with the Lefkow killings. And though I've been told that police are looking into white hate groups, and are now running down a lead about two white skinheads possibly seen in the alley before the crime, no one has formally connected Hale or white supremacists to it either.

Someone knows what happened. That person pulled the trigger.

Until we see evidence, or have people on the record talking about it, it is all speculation. It's what we journalists do when we don't have all the facts, and sometimes homicide cops count on us telling ourselves lies, figuring we'll spin stories away from what really happened and they'll have space to do their work.

"There is much speculation between this crime and the possible involvement of hate groups," Chicago police Chief of Detectives James Molloy said Tuesday. "This is but one facet of our investigation.

"We are looking in many, many directions, but it would be far too early to draw any definitive links," Molloy said. "The case is too new, and the evidence is still being worked up."

All we know is that whoever did this committed two slayings. The rest is incomplete, with pieces missing, like the red-brick alley behind Lefkow's home.